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Firefox address bar

wiki.tilde.institute

161–170 of 332 posts

Re: Firefox address bar

#161

My favourite find of the past 12 months is Ctrl+L which gives the address bar focus so you can begin typing.

Welcome to the club! The day I knew about it and till know I don’t think I ever clicked in search bar to search. This shortcut is very helpful! In similar context, Ctrl+w for closing tab.

Some browser-based editors will helpfully offer Vim bindings for editing, without exhaustively emulating all bindings. Of course, once in the flow of editing, I type Ctrl+W to delete a word, and voila, the tab closes!

Re: Firefox address bar

#162
post #2

I don't think I've ever used these modifiers but Firefox's address bar, Awesomebar, is indeed awesome. Compared to the utter garbage that is Chromium's Omnibar, I can find any page I've visited within a few key strokes. Chromium, on the other hand, almost immediately forgets and you have to go to the actual History to find it. Even Safari is miles ahead of Chromium in this regard. I'm still convinced that crippling O…

One reason why I prefer to use firefox at work. I can type some part of the title and it finds the Jira tickets/ confluence link easily from my history. Chrome would take me to search page and the search returns nothing since it cannot find anything from the locally hosted jira/confluence.

Re: Firefox address bar

#163

It used to be that search and address were two different fields in the browser UI. That helped - if typed in the address bar, you were probably looking for something in an address [so if you typed potato, it could search for a url in your local history with the word potato], and not for something in a web page. Then Google realized you could combine the two; this makes it less likely you will use a competing search,…

Firefox does have a setting to add the search bar back if that’s your jam, you can turn off address bar search suggestions in the settings too.

If you turn off address bar search suggestions then the address bar will still search anything you enter that’s not a url on your chosen default search engine though. You might be able to turn off that behaviour in about:config

Re: Firefox address bar

#164
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Firefox's best kept secret. To this day I cannot fathom anyone willingly switching from Firefox to Chrome/Edge/any other Chromium-based browser. There are so many tiny features that are useful at least to myself, while a minor JavaScript performance advantage isn't something that important in the grand scale of things.

Firefox is increasingly unfriendly to power users. Wouldn't surprise me if they got rid of this feature someday because they have statistics showing few people use it.

And rightfully so. Why maintain a feature for a small minority? Let them fork and maintain it themselves.

Re: Firefox address bar

#165
post #49

The killer feature is that you can extend this with your own macros. E.g. if you want the address bar to recognize "hn " as a prefix keyword, and redirect "hn firefox address bar" to, say, Algolia — you simply create a bookmark with "Keyword": "hn" and "URL": " https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%s " (not actually a URL, don't click on it) – %s indicating where the macro parameter substitutes. Then "hn firefox address bar" ma…

This is Firefox's best kept secret. To this day I cannot fathom anyone willingly switching from Firefox to Chrome/Edge/any other Chromium-based browser. There are so many tiny features that are useful at least to myself, while a minor JavaScript performance advantage isn't something that important in the grand scale of things.

Chrome manages to do this without a command character. Much better UX.

Re: Firefox address bar

#166

The killer feature is that you can extend this with your own macros. E.g. if you want the address bar to recognize "hn " as a prefix keyword, and redirect "hn firefox address bar" to, say, Algolia — you simply create a bookmark with "Keyword": "hn" and "URL": " https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%s " (not actually a URL, don't click on it) – %s indicating where the macro parameter substitutes. Then "hn firefox address bar" ma…

I don't see any "Keyword" field when creating bookmark, only "Tags".

If you mean from clicking on the star in the address bar, that is correct.

However, if you edit the bookmark afterwards from the bookmarks sidebar, or add a bookmark on the "Manage bookmarks" tab (CTRL+SHIFT+O), you do see it.

Re: Firefox address bar

#167
post #90
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Firefox's best kept secret. To this day I cannot fathom anyone willingly switching from Firefox to Chrome/Edge/any other Chromium-based browser. There are so many tiny features that are useful at least to myself, while a minor JavaScript performance advantage isn't something that important in the grand scale of things.

Funny enough, I just posted on Mastodon looking for recommendations of other browsers to try. While I love the flexibility and openness that Firefox brings, there is a resource issue for me on my macbook pro. I have to spend a lot of time in Google Meets for work, and video conferencing via Firefox seems to redline the computer... It sounds like a jet engine and I wind up thermal throttling to the point that my machi…

Have you tried disabling hardware acceleration?

Re: Firefox address bar

#168

The killer feature is that you can extend this with your own macros. E.g. if you want the address bar to recognize "hn " as a prefix keyword, and redirect "hn firefox address bar" to, say, Algolia — you simply create a bookmark with "Keyword": "hn" and "URL": " https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%s " (not actually a URL, don't click on it) – %s indicating where the macro parameter substitutes. Then "hn firefox address bar" ma…

I don't see any "Keyword" field when creating bookmark, only "Tags".

It's kind of weird that these turn into bookmarks and are mixed in with your bookmarks.

I think what people are talking about in this thread are "Search Shortcuts". And I don't know why this is a "best kept secret"; it's right in the Search section of your FF settings.

If you want to create one "one the fly", don't create a bookmark, but instead right-click in a search field and choose "Add a keyword for this search..." You can try it using the search at the bottom of this page.

Re: Firefox address bar

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any "Keyword" field when creating bookmark, only "Tags".

If you mean from clicking on the star in the address bar, that is correct. However, if you edit the bookmark afterwards from the bookmarks sidebar, or add a bookmark on the "Manage bookmarks" tab (CTRL+SHIFT+O), you do see it.

Yes, that did help, Thanks!

Re: Firefox address bar

#170
I personally like Amazon's approach, where there is a dropdown menu in front of the search bar where you can select if you want to search in "Books", "Electronics", etc.
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